Should i upgrade my CPU or GPU

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itzjack

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Dec 28, 2014
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Hello so im looking to upgrade one component of my pc but cant decide which one would be the better upgrade as ive heard people say some CPU can bottleneck GPU so i was wondering if you guys could help me out.(Im upgrading my PSU which is why i left it out of the specs)

PC Specs:
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
RAM: 8GB

 
Solution
burdenbound


Then I would recommend not even considering the 1080, it's way overkill and will be wasting money. Even the 1070 is overkill which is why I would keep an eye on the RX480, rumor has it at around GTX 970/980 performance for only $200.
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yes the cpu you have is still quite decent. i would recommend a new GPU like sizzling said. he knows whats going on. you didnt exactly say you wanted to improve performance in games, which is what he and i are both assuming.
 
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Im looking to upgrade to a card such as maybe the GTX 1070 or 1080 will my CPU bottleneck them?
 
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maybe slightly but probably not. what type of motherboard do you have? because with the right motherboard you can overclock that non-k cpu up to 3.6ghz too. the i5 3330 does have kind of a low clock speed. you would need a z77 motherboard to do this.
 
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Motherboard is Asus P8H61-MX R2.0

 
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Then I would recommend not even considering the 1080, it's way overkill and will be wasting money. Even the 1070 is overkill which is why I would keep an eye on the RX480, rumor has it at around GTX 970/980 performance for only $200.
 
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Solution


Ok thanks for the help!

 
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The RX 480 seems to be a really good choice. At $200 you'd be able to pay any game on max settings and you wouldn't need a beefy GPU.
 
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Bottlenecking CONFUSION:

You need to understand that games vary significantly in how much CPU they use. A game like Tomb Raider tends to have much less CPU bottleneck so a GTX1070 would be noticeably faster than an RX-480 with the same CPU.

Having said that, the RX-480 will give a great experience so it comes down to how important performance vs budget is and the types of games you tend to play.

*PRICING is also screwed up right now (and the RX-480 hasn't even launched). The following prices are what I expect to see once we have enough stock and things stabilize->

GTX1070 -> $430USD+

RX-480 8GB -> $260USD+

I recommend the 8GB version of the RX-480. A few games like GTA 5 already benefit from more than 4GB VRAM.

*Best case for the GTX1070 is likely 25% faster than the R9-480X on your system. So, for example about 50FPS vs 63FPS.

Other:
a) VR - if you care about Virtual Reality (like the Oculus Rift) you may want to hold off and see what AMD details are. NVidia has up to 1.6X performance increase due to some hardware changes (SMP)

So best case scenario with minimal CPU bottleneck is that the GTX1070 is about 2X faster in VR (assuming AMD doesn't have the same thing but we just don't know).

b) AMD's GCN - their GPU's are really well optimized for DX12 and also what the consoles use. They did some further low-level tweaks which will benefit in some future games as well.

The XB1 Scorpio looks to be a Zen/Polaris APU with the GPU being almost identical to an RX-480 (Polaris with 6TFlops approx). So game developers are going to be optimizing for this architecture and performance level.
 
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